GOOD COMMUNITY, BAD COMMUNITY, JEWISH COMMUNITY

“Of course I ruined the lives of my wife and children—but that’s another story.”

One Saturday morning not too long ago, Tracey was the featured speaker at my synagogue. He told a hero’s tale. Described the arc of a brave and epic journey. In other words, he talked about himself. At only one point in his narrative did he refer to the casualties inevitable in such a saga, tossing off humorously and in passing the remark that his self-realization of course ruined the lives of my wife and children—but that’s another story.

At the conclusion of his talk, the congregation surrounded him. Showered congratulations. No questions were asked. No exceptions were taken to his portrait of courage. He was a hero.

I was told about Tracey’s talk by Sam, the man who had made Tracey’s children French toast that morning for breakfast, driven Tracey’s son to his martial arts class on his way to synagogue, and would hurry away at the conclusion of the service to pick him up at class and drive him home. It was by chance that I wasn’t with Sam that morning. It was the day of the annual winter fund-raiser at my daughters’ school. It feels bad to do things like that on the Sabbath, but public schools don’t organize their schedules around the needs of religious minorities, and we are also members of this school community. So that’s where my girls and I were spending the day, with me working at one of the craft-making stations just like all the other parents. Well, most of the parents.

In the course of my marriage, my religious life and Jewish community—the actual communities I was part of at different points along the way and the community I longed for but never quite found—grew increasingly central to who I was, how I wanted to live and raise my children. Jewish is a group identity. When we were abandoned by our havurah, the small group that we worshipped with, and by our then rabbi, when our larger synagogue community wasn’t there for us, there were inevitable scars. Scars I try to forget. I know that I am blessed. I have never for an instant experienced disillusionment with Judaism. We weren’t abandoned by God.

When Tracey and I split up, he left the synagogue we’d attended as a family to the children and to me. I wanted to start over with a new synagogue, but the two available were too far away, and in any case, Tracey began attending both of them. With great difficulty I decided I had no choice but to make an uneasy peace with my own congregation. At first I went by myself once in a while. My children, Adam most vociferously, refused to go with me. The kids knew—Tracey told them—that he had many friends at our synagogue. They didn’t know that when I turned to the rabbi for support, he had nothing to offer.

I first tried to talk with the rabbi during the months leading up to Adam’s bar mitzvah and our separation. I explained what was happening behind the scenes in our family. The rabbi was my age but relatively new at being a rabbi. He had no children, no experience to draw on faced with someone in my situation. The pastoral care class in rabbinical school probably didn’t cover this one. What do you say to the congregant who tells you her children are traumatized and falling apart in consequence of losing their father in this unique way? He was hopelessly out of his depth. “This isn’t The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,” he brought out finally. That may not have been one of his finer moments. It also wasn’t his worst. When one of my children was diagnosed with a heart condition shortly after Tracey moved out, I knew better than to look to him for support. But we ran into each other one day, and when he asked how we were I told him. He stared at me in silence for a minute, looked appalled, then changed the subject.

My kids didn’t know about these things. But they were aware that neither the rabbi nor anyone else from the congregation was reaching out to us. They concluded that no one in their Jewish community cared.

“Why doesn’t F love us, as well as Daddy?” Bibi asked about a member of our erstwhile havurah and synagogue.

I didn’t know what to tell her.

But in this absence of love, I found an unexpected freedom: the freedom to cry during services. Crying, at the time, was the only way I could attend a service. I decided if the congregation didn’t care about me, I—the woman who would once have died rather than let anyone know her life wasn’t perfect!—wouldn’t care what they thought of my tears. Allowing myself to cry meant I got to pray with other Jews. To hear the words and the melodies that I love. Usually nothing happened to disrupt my sense that I was ignored there. But very occasionally something did. There were small, isolated, meaningful gestures of compassion. Long in coming, but sweet when they arrived.

Once a man came up to me after service. “For a long time I’ve been feeling the absence of kavanah in the community,” he told me, using a Hebrew word that expresses the spirit, or intention, behind prayer. “Then this morning when I walked into the sanctuary I felt such a powerful sense of kavanah. When I looked around, I realized it was you.”

From time to time, less dramatic, no less appreciated, someone would say she or he was glad to see me back. I received a couple of notes from congregants who barely knew me but wanted to offer some form of support. Eventually I got over having to cry. I didn’t feel at home in the congregation, but I was reconciled. At this point Tracey informed me that he would once again be attending services at the synagogue. Distraught, I asked him to stay away. The children asked him to stay away.

“You promised not to come back,” I pointed out. “I’ve gone through a lot to reconcile myself to this congregation because I thought it was my place, my only place, to worship.”

“There’s no problem,” Tracey insisted blithely. “I said the synagogue was yours—then. This is now. We can both be there at the same time. It won’t bother me.”

“We don’t live in the same house anymore,” I tried to explain. “We can’t worship in the same house of prayer. It doesn’t work for me.”

After a while, I heard that the rabbi had declined to go through the process of contract renewal and was leaving. As his final act, he initiated a campaign to have the synagogue’s bylaws changed to declare the welcome inclusion of transsexuals. Transsexuals were already welcome, visible, and included. It simply wasn’t stated so in the bylaws. The gesture felt like the rabbi’s personal legacy to my family.

I’ve already described my experiences with the small group, or havurah, that my family had celebrated Shabbat and holidays with. When the group so painfully deserted the children and me following Tracey’s feminine debut, I shared my anguish with friends outside the Jewish community.

“This is a religious group?” my friends questioned, incredulous.

I couldn’t explain to people who were giving me so much support why the Jewish community had no warmth to spare my children or me. I didn’t, I don’t, know. Much worse, I didn’t know what to tell my children. So many adults recall experiences with religious communities during childhood that poisoned their relationship to faith for life. I didn’t want that for my children. I decided I had to try to offset the bad memories by creating good ones.

Our first post-Tracey Passover gave me the opportunity to lead our family seder solo for the first time. In the Jewish year, Passover is a profound experience of release from bondage, renewal, regeneration, re-creation. That’s what this particular Passover was for me. The occasion carried traces of sadness for all that we had lost. I didn’t pretend to myself that these feelings weren’t present. What’s more, I didn’t have to engage in pretense with anyone else. From my place at the head of my dining room table, I led the seder with self-confidence and joy and, sweetest of all, with my children’s help. When I looked at our assembled guests, unaffiliated Jews and gentiles who might not have celebrated this holiday at all if not for my invitation to join us, I marveled to think that everyone there knew what the children and I had been through. The fact of their knowing didn’t leave me vulnerable or exposed. It made me stronger. It felt good.

That Passover was a coming-of-age milestone event for me. We’ve had many other wonderful Jewish occasions since, often in our own home. On one Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Sam and I grew tired of synagogue hopping in pursuit of a place where I could feel comfortable. We decided to stay home and study the part of the Torah, the Bible, that is read in synagogue on that day. With Lilly curled up against Sam on the living room sofa, Adam, Bibi, Sam, and I had a richly spiritual and wide-ranging conversation as four equal searchers. It was a conversation that inside sanctuary walls probably wouldn’t have taken place at all and would never have included children. That Rosh Hashanah day we also inaugurated a private practice of doing Tashlich together. In this New Year’s ritual, Jews toss bread crumbs, representing sins or other things they wish to rid themselves of from the past year, into moving water. While a group from the synagogue performed Tashlich at a local river, we found quiet meaning at the edge of a stream near my home, casting our crumbs with one another—and with the dog who dived into the water after them. My children and I, now sometimes joined by Sam, share many such Jewish experiences on our own.

Yet I still long for community. For me and for my children.

Recently I mentioned our community’s embrace of Tracey, and its desertion of my children and me, to a rabbi I didn’t know at the time Tracey went public. While I spoke, the rabbi nodded and smiled as if anticipating everything he heard. I felt confused. Had he somehow known what I was going to say?

“I’m familiar with everything you’re describing,” he explained. “Over twenty years ago my father came out as a gay man. Saying you were gay in the late eighties was like saying you’re transgendered now. My family felt the way yours did. Our congregation treated him like a hero and we felt abandoned. I remember my mother saying exactly the things you’re saying now.”

Can the rabbi’s story help my children? Would it make them feel better or worse to hear that religious communities commonly turn away at the very moments when, in Bibi’s words, you need to feel love? Maybe for children—or anyone?—the assurance that God loves you when you don’t feel loved by your fellow worshippers just isn’t real. Just isn’t enough.

Once during our first year as a single-parent family, Bibi told me, “With all these changes I need something to hold on to!”

“How about Hashem [God]?” I suggested.

“Mama…” She sighed patiently. “It’s hard for me to be religious when I’m eight.”